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    <title>Donald W. Davies: Paul Baran - a co-inventor of packet switching</title>
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                                <h2>Paul Baran publishes "On Distributed Communications" Series<br>
                                <span class="date">published in 1964</span></h2>
                                <p>Paul Baran, a researcher at <a href="http://www.rand.org/">RAND Corporation</a>, publishes "On Distributed Communications" Series. He was working on a scheme for U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to survive a nuclear attack.</p>
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                                <p>Baran suggested a distributed network–"a communication network which will allow several hundred major communications stations to talk with one another after an enemy attack." This type of system would have no centralized switch. He also had the idea to divide messages into "message blocks" before sending them out across the network. Each block would be sent separately and rejoined into a whole when they were received at their destination. This concept later came to be known as packet-switching.</p>
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            <div id="bottombackground">References. 
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                    <li>[1] Paul Baran. <a target="_new" href="http://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.list.html">On Distributed Communications Series</a>. 1964</li>
                    <li>[2] Lemelson-MIT Program. <a target="_new" href="http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/Baran.html">Inventor of the Week</a>. April 2001</li>
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